long exposure

Posts taggedwith long exposure

In a new music video for the musician and DJ Max Cooper (previously), Páraic McGloughlin (previously) turns a single viewpoint over an anonymous highway into a nearly five-minute-long psychedelic collage. The Irish film director was tasked with “visualizing the Platonic realm of form underlying reality,” writes Cooper in a statement about the video. To do so McGloughlin situated himself on a bridge in Sligo, Ireland for 19 hours, to create a single, day-long shot that he then manipulated. The final result is a dizzying mashup of visual effects. Grids, spirals, and pixels composed of the original video footage flash and swirl across the screen, showing the viewer snapshots of the sky, highway, and grassy hills.

“Aesthetically I love the mix of abstraction and realism and this was a great place for me to explore this,” McGloughlin shares. “Using a fundamental image (a time lapse) to mask and cut into, I tried to show the variable possibilities within a limited time span, maintaining the integrity of each individual photograph while dissecting and rearranging the overall image.” The visual content was matched with each layer of audio created by Cooper to form the song, which stacks up to over one hundred layers. You can watch more videos from McGloughlin on Vimeo and Instagram, and discover Cooper’s music on his website and SoundCloud. (via Vimeo Staff Picks)

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Reuben Wu (previously) uses long exposure techniques to capture light traces formed by a moving drone equipped with a lighting rig. In his latest group of images the paths create illuminated symbols such as a square, plus sign, and triangle from straight, narrow lines. The shapes hover just above the horizon with an abstracted reflection projected in the water below. “The project name Aeroglyph describes what I see as large temporary geometries created in the air,” Wu tells Colossal, “only visible in their entirety through the capture of a camera.”

The project is an evolution of his ongoing Lux Noctis series which focuses on specific light paths, rather than entire illuminated landscapes. “This is why I chose a wide and featureless body of water, where there are no other compositional elements other than a horizon and a textural reflection in the water,” Wu explains. The plus and minus symbols were shot over the Pacific Ocean at night, while the square and triangle were captured over the bright blue waters of Lake Michigan.

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Daniel Mercadante has a slate of unique films under his belt, made in partnership with his wife Katina, as The Mercadantes, including Ball and Breathe. More recently, Daniel has been exploring the still image in a colorful series called Rainbow Road. The Mercadantes were based in California for many years, but after a move to rural Connecticut, Daniel looked for a way to add some warmth to the chilly blue hour during the Northeast’s long winters.

Using long exposure photography and a custom built lighting rig covered in colored gels, the process of creating the images is surprisingly simple: the roads are created by Daniel running around with the lighting rig. No other post-production manipulation occurs, other than basic color and exposure balancing. The photographer explains to Colossal, “after so many years focused on the moving image, I’ve struggled with singularly caught moments in still imagery—so I love how this project still requires images to be captured over 15sec-1 minute, so in some way they require the same passages of time that a shot in one of our short films might.”

In addition to their Connecticut Rainbow Roads (which Daniel divulges may have a distant relation to the Mario Kart pathways of his youth) the Mercadantes have taken this colorful project to Guatemala, where local kids chose the photo shoot locations. Daniel reports that they hope to continue traveling with their low-tech, high-color Roads. You can see more from the Mercadantes on Instagram and Vimeo.

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Russian photographer Daniel Kordan is a master of photographing the cosmos. In 2016 we covered his journey to the Salar de Uyuni, where he captured millions of brilliantly hued stars reflected in the world’s largest salt flat. Recently, Kordan returned from a trip to Namibia where he mapped swirling trails of stars above the Deadvlei, a white clay pan speckled with the 900-year-old tree skeletons, and other sites across the Namib desert.

The images feature vortexes of multi-colored stars streaked across the sky like post-impressionist paintings. The Milky Way’s warm and cool tones intermix to create a kaleidoscopic vision of the sky above, and illuminate the barren desert landscape below. To capture such images yourself, Kordan suggests creating a time lapse with a wide angle lens, and utilizing an app like PhotoPills which allows you to easily predict the position of the stars.

You can see more of Kordan’s exploration through Namibia in the images below, and view his photographs from other locations across the globe on his website and Instagram.

Recently Wu has evolved his process of working with the drones to form light paths above topographical peaks in the mountainous terrain. “I see it as a kind of ‘zero trace’ version of land art where the environment remains untouched by the artist, and at the same time is presented in a sublime way which speaks to 19th century Romantic painting and science and fictional imagery,” said Wu to Colossal.

The light from his GPS-enabled drones create a halo effect around some of the presented cliffs and crests when photographed using a long exposure. An elegant circle of light traces the flight of the drone, leaving a mark only perceptible in the resulting photograph. You can see more of Wu’s landscape photography on his Instagram and Facebook. (via Faith is Torment)

Update: A book of Wu’s photo series will be published in Fall 2018 and is available for preorder.

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We’ve long been drawn to self-taught photographer Mikko Lagerstedt’s (previously) dreamy composite photos of Finland and Iceland at night. In his long-exposure images, meteors are seen streaking through the sky and frigid waterfalls appear like mist. Lagerstedt composes and edits all of his images in Lightroom and Photoshop and shares numerous tutorials on his techniques through his website. He most recently returned from a photoshoot at a deserted Yyteri Beach in Finland, more of which he shared on Instagram.

Photographer Chris McCaw uses the power of the sun to burn markings into his photographs, destroying small areas to appear like the sun itself. McCaw stumbled upon the technique for his series Sunburn after forgetting to close the shutter during an all night exposure. The light of the morning sun destroyed his efforts from the night before, reversing the tonality of the work in a way that has inspired McCaw to continue to experiment with injuring the surface of the photograph.

“The subject of the photograph (the sun) has transcended the idea that a photograph is simple a representation of reality, and has physically come through the lens and put it’s hand onto the final piece,” said McCaw in an explanation of the series. “This is a process of creation and destruction, all happening within the the camera.”

The resulting image from McCaw’s technique shows the landscapes he photographs with a burnt hole or streak where the sun appeared overhead. Often McCaw will combine several works to showcase the sun’s movement—charred dots or a thick line marking its arched path.